Tea at Trianon: The Vatican Honors Monsignor Hugh O'Flaherty

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Thursday, May 19, 2016

The Vatican Honors Monsignor Hugh O'Flaherty

From Church Militant:

An Irish priest who dodged the Gestapo for more than two years during the Nazi occupation of Rome was commemorated by the Holy See and the Teutonic College in the Vatican last weekend, which honored the priest for saving thousands of Jewish and Allied soldiers' lives during the Second World War.

Monsignor Hugh O'Flaherty was responsible for saving 6,500 Allied soldiers and Jews. His ability to evade the traps set by the German Gestapo and Secret Police by donning assorted disguises earned O'Flaherty the nickname "The Scarlet Pimpernel of the Vatican."

"The Scarlet Pimpernel," a novel written in 1905, is a story set during the French Revolution that followed Sir Percy Blakeney, a.k.a. the Scarlet Pimpernel. Blakeney saved many aristocrats using different costumes and disguises, saving them from execution by guillotine at the hands of revolutionaries.

In the early years of World War II, Msgr. O'Flaherty toured many prisoner of war camps with the aim of finding soldiers who were reported missing. If he found missing soldiers at the camps, he would later reassure the concerned families through the use of Vatican Radio. (Read more.)